Historic Posrcards of the Grand Canyon

How do we see the Grand Canyon? If you are lucky enough to travel to the Canyon, you may experience it with your sense of sight, smell, sound, and touch.  You may take in the play of light and shadows on the canyon’s walls and the changing hues as the sun rises or sets.  These experiences combine to create a personal vision of the Grand Canyon, one grounded in first hand knowledge and memory of the place.  For many people, however, seeing the Grand Canyon is only possible through other people’s eyes.  A trip to the Grand Canyon may be too expensive, require too much time away from work or other family commitments, or not be physically possible.  These virtual visitors will view the canyon through photographs, paintings, and sketches made by other intrepid travelers.  Paintings, photographs and evocative verbal descriptions abound in the published literature on the Grand Canyon. But another source of visual information about the canyon, often overlooked, comes from postcards.

Visitors to the Grand Canyon have used postcards to share their experiences with friends and family for over 100 years.  Postcards emerged from European roots in the 1870s, where printed trade and advertising cards were used to draw popular attention to products and services for sale.  By the 1890s, they were also employed widely to advertise tourist attractions and designed so that purchasers could send them by mail.  Europeans eagerly collected and circulated picture postcards or “view cards” as they were also known. Picture postcards became popular in the United States after 1893 when the first souvenir picture postcards were sold at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

They generally had an image on the front of the card and the mailing address on the back of the card.  At that time, postal service regulations stipulated that only the postal address was allowed on the back of the postcard—no personal notes. Senders of these early picture postcards consequently wrote their notes around the edges of the image on the front of the card, often in the narrow blank border around the picture.  Regulations soon changed. By 1902 in Europe and by 1907 in the United States postcards had a divided back, a printed line separating the back of the card into two sections, one for the address and one for a personal note. Postcard production and use skyrocketed after this innovation.  The cheap price—one-cent postage rate in the U.S.—and speedy delivery helped popularize this new communication medium.

Some of the earliest postcard images of the Grand Canyon were manufactured by the Detroit Publishing Company.  Using photographers, artists, and a patented print making process, Detroit Publishing created hundreds of images of the Grand Canyon during their production years 1895-1924. The company became one of the world’s leaders in postcard manufacturing by acquiring an immense photographic collection and creating unique products through a refined lithographic print method. Its postcard representations of the Grand Canyon were usually sold by the Fred Harvey Company, which ran the tourist concession for the Santa Fe Railway at Grand Canyon and many other national parks. Many of the Detroit Publishing postcards depicting scenes at the Grand Canyon have the Fred Harvey logo on them.